Chop and change

Did you watch that programme about the queen's 'secret' cousins last night? I recorded it and watched it this afternoon so it made a poignant intro to Children in Need. How times have changed in our attitudes but it's easy to disown and forget the past the past like people were disowned and forgotten. There were many of those vast Victorian buildings dotted about the countryside in Wales...some of them had 'short stay' wards where people from the neighbouring communities might stay after some breakdown or episode. I visited a few people in them and they could be very forbidding places. When they were closed down and the long term residents rehoused in the late nineties I was working for Social Services delivering 'care in the community' in various ways. Some former patients, especially the more elderly ones, found the upheaval to such a different way of life very hard to adjust to but others suddenly blossomed like those tiny tightly folded paper Chinese flowers you put in water. There were those who originally had so very little wrong with them apart from being a little slow and having a physical disability and offending sensibilities in some way so that their lives could be signed away. An unmarried deaf girl having a baby perhaps, a young man with some mental health problems who relieved himself on the street after a night at his local and was charged with indecent exposure. Thirty, forty, fifty years in these underfunded primitive institutions and you usually come out worse than you went in. Though of course the intention originally was that you stayed put til you died. We heard and read stories so sad. I give thanks for the privilege of knowing and working with some of those special souls, and in some of the most enlightened local authority projects around.

There but for the grace of something...I thought of the learning disabled kids in the little children's home I was in - waiting to be old enough for places like that maybe. And I thought about me, in there because I ran away from my unhappy home and having to stay because, I guess, it was happier with me out of the way. One of my mum's boyfriends asked about me once and was told apparently 'Oh, we don't talk about her!' Still at least I wasn't listed as dead...like the queen's cousins...and can still talk about them. I give thanks for coming so far without all the care we now know that children need, and for all the care I did have.

On a lighter note...I was mystified as to why everyone was getting so worked up about a mere food processor. Doesn't everyone have them, I thought? And then I realised no, we usually make do with those plug in whisky thingies now don't we? Well I've got one of those and it's OK as far as it goes, and an old liquidiser/grinder with blunt blades and a leaking lid which isn't, and a Kenwood Chefette electric whisk which was the latest thing when my mum had it more than forty years ago but weighs a ton...but I used to have a food processor when Bob was toddler and it did all manner of useful tasks I thought I'd get another and not have to wash up all the pieces of kit that failed to chop, slice, liquidise, grate and crumb (as well as the knife and the board and my fingers I have to go back to). Now I've looked at the price of some of them I can see why everyone's getting so worked up! No, no, not one of those! I'm not a domestic goddess just a vegetarian who likes home made food and whose hands don't work very well! Trust me, this is quite small and basic and wasn't expensive even before it was half price but it had good reviews. I'm grateful for the money to buy the thing of course and but I'm not going to decide for sure if I'm grateful for it itself until I've made nut roast, coleslaw and crumble, the proof of the pudding is in the processor!